PvP An Investigation Into Frontier's Actions on Combat Logging, Part 2

[seko]

When will all you people realise that this game, is a game of exploration, primarily, and discovery. Piracy is cool but just shooting players because you can be a player killer is .. well you just don't get it. If you want to go kill things go play Halo, or any other shoot em up platform games, and leave us alone, as that's the way your neanderthal mind works. Not brave enough to join the army in the real world, so you alter ego becomes a bully here .. This thread has gone on long enough, and is tired. Grow up, take a step back, and think what this game is about

 

[WorldsGreatestForumDad]

When will all you people realise that this game, is a game of exploration, primarily, and discovery. Piracy is cool but just shooting players because you can be a player killer is .. well you just don't get it. If you want to go kill things go play Halo, or any other shoot em up platform games, and leave us alone, as that's the way your neanderthal mind works. Not brave enough to join the army in the real world, so you alter ego becomes a bully here .. This thread has gone on long enough, and is tired. Grow up, take a step back, and think what this game is about

Okay I took a step back.

 

[Red Anders]

When will all you people realise that this game, is a game of exploration, primarily, and discovery.

Hmmm. Probably not for as long as this is on the game's official website.

https://www.elitedangerous.com/en/gameplay/

...as that's the way your neanderthal mind works. Not brave enough to join the army in the real world, so you alter ego becomes a bully here ..

The fact that you can post this and then tell people to grow up shows a truly remarkable lack of perception. It's almost like you're doing exactly what the mods told you not to do in an attempt to get the thread locked again. *theatrical gasp*

 

[Devari]

In all fairness I can apply the same logic to your assumptions that everybody experiences so many regular disconnections from the game. Is it correct because you say so? The only people that can comfirm or deny this assumption is FD themselves so that particular avenue of your argument is a moot point that cannot go anywhere.

Except that the game is known to be highly unstable and crash frequently. Complaints about these issues are mentioned throughout the forums in various threads and this has been a problem since the game launched. Multicrew and wing D/Cs are particularly problematic and FD apparently doesn't have the ability or interest in fixing these issues. Trying to suggest that all of those complains about bug crashes and D/C aren't reliable is just not a credible argument to make.

When I look for "evidence" that players are combat logging frequently and that "nothing is done" about it, I only see one thread about that. It's this one. It was created for a very specific purpose, to argue a very specific agenda and provides very limited "evidence" which actually proves nothing.

One would imagine frontier would have and do have mechanisms in place to differentiate between genuine combat logging and random disconnects.

According to FD's official response to this issue, they do.

 

[sewerratuk]

If you haven't just rolled in from the pub you should be ashamed posting stuff like this.

Rep for that quote. Made me smile, even if for the fact I’ve been guilty of post pub posting previously

 

[Devari]

Anybody experiencing as many disconnections as some of you are suggesting should not be playing in Open, simple as that. I know that if my connection was so bad that I was constantly dropping out no way no how would I be playing in Open. It's not fair to the other players.

Well unfortunately the only two ways I can try to avoid these disconnects consist of:

1. Never playing in multicrew. I actually purchased a second account specifically to fill the co-pilot's seat on my ships but it's usually not worth the effort to log in with my second account unless I'm doing very specific activities such as CZ or RES combat. I would like to use it more often for the purpose of having the seat filled if nothing else (the pip bonus and rebuy discount are nice but only really relevant in combat) but I don't enjoy having to reconnect every 10 minutes. I've pretty much given up on multicrew until FD "improves" it, which they apparently aren't doing because not enough players use a buggy feature that crashes all the time.

2. Trying to avoid parts of the game known to be bugged. Unfortunately this includes basically the entire game, including all transitions between instances. This would mean never engaging SC (jump to SC often crashes), never landing on a planet (transition to glide often crashes), never being interdicted (all sorts of bugs), never Engineering anything (menu often freezes) and generally avoiding the entire game which is full of bugs. Since I can't play the game without doing these things there is no way to avoid the bugged parts of the game without refusing to play the game entirely.

I do everything else possible to allow the game to run as stable and smoothly as possible, including using an internet landline and minimizing other resource-intensive programs when I'm playing, but the game is inherently unstable. I don't have anywhere near this level of crashes and D/Cs in any of the other online games I play so it's not my connection, my router, my ISP, the phase of the moon or what I ate for breakfast that causes the game to crash this often. It's the fact that Elite is quite simply a buggy, unstable game. Any discussion of combat logging quite simply has to deal with that issue in some way.

 

[jasonbarron]

Well unfortunately the only two ways I can try to avoid these disconnects consist of:

1. Never playing in multicrew. I actually purchased a second account specifically to fill the co-pilot's seat on my ships but it's usually not worth the effort to log in with my second account unless I'm doing very specific activities such as CZ or RES combat. I would like to use it more often for the purpose of having the seat filled if nothing else (the pip bonus and rebuy discount are nice but only really relevant in combat) but I don't enjoy having to reconnect every 10 minutes. I've pretty much given up on multicrew until FD "improves" it, which they apparently aren't doing because not enough players use a buggy feature that crashes all the time.

2. Trying to avoid parts of the game known to be bugged. Unfortunately this includes basically the entire game, including all transitions between instances. This would mean never engaging SC (jump to SC often crashes), never landing on a planet (transition to glide often crashes), never being interdicted (all sorts of bugs), never Engineering anything (menu often freezes) and generally avoiding the entire game which is full of bugs. Since I can't play the game without doing these things there is no way to avoid the bugged parts of the game without refusing to play the game entirely.

I do everything else possible to allow the game to run as stable and smoothly as possible, including using an internet landline and minimizing other resource-intensive programs when I'm playing, but the game is inherently unstable. I don't have anywhere near this level of crashes and D/Cs in any of the other online games I play so it's not my connection, my router, my ISP, the phase of the moon or what I ate for breakfast that causes the game to crash this often. It's the fact that Elite is quite simply a buggy, unstable game. Any discussion of combat logging quite simply has to deal with that issue in some way.

As far as I'm concerned these scenarios are the only real positive argument there is for group/solo modes, and if I was having problems similar to yours I would play in them before I would subject my fellow CMDR's to my untimely disconnects. If you're in group nobody cares if you drop out.

 

[BirdWisdom]

Those who become caught in the act of Combat logging proly blame the internet connections alwaaaaaaaaays [big grin]

 

[Deleted member 110222]

As far as I'm concerned these scenarios are the only real positive argument there is for group/solo modes, and if I was having problems similar to yours I would play in them before I would subject my fellow CMDR's to my untimely disconnects. If you're in group nobody cares if you drop out.

I'm not a network engineer. But high ping can cause dropout? Really shooting in the dark here.

Anyway, I know I've said people should play in Open anyway in the past, despite a crappy network. I was likely wrong there.

Okay, I know this is going to sound extreme... But maybe FD could have a "minimum network requirement" for Open, if such a thing is technically feasible? (again, blind shooting here)

Note, this would only apply to Open. I'm not suggesting we block people with a poor network from playing with friends. Which is why groups would be unaffected by such a check. Heck, PvP is possible in groups! Nobody is losing anything in terms of actual gameplay.

 

[Asp Explorer]

But maybe FD could have a "minimum network requirement" for Open, if such a thing is technically feasible? (again, blind shooting here)

We've been asking for that for years!!!!!!!

Yes - it is entirely feasible. It is entirely possible with their implementation of Watchdog. It takes only a few seconds before full client connect and can be maintained throughout a session. It already tests for scrub shenanigans. The only way it's not a reliable arbitrator of network performance, is because the internet itself is not reliable. Routes come and go every millisecond. It's why we have routers.

 

[Shackram]

There is no getting away from the fact that SDC's reputation precedes them though, and will tarnish any reasonable assessment of their position. If they really wanted to be the game's vanguard of righteousness and getting problems fixed, they shouldn't have previously allowed members to engage in attery. It's hard to have much sympathy for them I'm afraid. It's sad isn't it, when being jerks comes back to bite hey.

And there you have it, the root of many problems.

The day certain PvP players the concept of accountability and the concept of "Don't defecate on the bed you lay on" is the day those discussions will actually get anywhere.

 

[Devari]

Sadly, as Elite relies heavily on UDP and NAT traversal - that some routers consider attacks and drop connections, there's not really much FD can do about it.

Not to mention that the number of concurrent connections that Elite can bring together start to get into non-trivial territory. Something a ISP freebie or a $40 Walmart special internet box with 2Mb of RAM and a CPU that an Amiga 500 would laugh at, could reasonably be expected to have problems with.

Which sort of comes right back to the issue of FD choosing to develop Elite on a much cheaper P2P architecture instead of a server-client model. Not only does it make the game less stable than a client-server model it also means that FD is completely incapable of enforcing any sort of ship persistence following the termination of the client process.

The reality is that we are suffering the limitations of a decision that FD already made before the game was launched, i.e., the decision to go with a P2P architecture. To their credit, FD has actually improved various limitations of this over the past few years, i.e., we can now see station orientation in SC, there have been some efforts to have at least a minimum degree of NPC persistence (at least for prior damage) between instances and they have gradually tried to make the limitations less "visible" to the average player. I think they can still do quite a bit more to improve the game's stability issues that relate to crashes that do not involve other players being connected in my instance, i.e., when I can see my bandwidth is <1000 B/s that means I am in the instance by myself and if the game crashes it is not because of someone else's connection.

What FD cannot do however is come up with a definitive solution to combat logging without switching to a server-client model and that is quite simply not going to happen. Until then we have a buggy, unstable game that has no way to reliably detect combat logging, much less provide a definitive solution to the issue.

 

[Deleted member 110222]

We've been asking for that for years!!!!!!!

Yes - it is entirely feasible. It is entirely possible with their implementation of Watchdog. It takes only a few seconds before full client connect and can be maintained throughout a session. It already tests for scrub shenanigans. The only way it's not a reliable arbitrator of network performance, is because the internet itself is not reliable. Routes come and go every millisecond. It's why we have routers.

I would not be against such a feature, as long as PG remains open season for any and all connections.

 

[Devari]

As far as I'm concerned these scenarios are the only real positive argument there is for group/solo modes, and if I was having problems similar to yours I would play in them before I would subject my fellow CMDR's to my untimely disconnects. If you're in group nobody cares if you drop out.

The issue here is that I enjoy playing in Open. I'm fundamentally a PVE player but I really have limited interest in single-player games. Even though Elite is very sparsely populated for a "multiplayer" game I at least want to have the potential to encounter other players. I refuse to enter Solo mode (I won't even mode switch to refresh the mission boards) because to me that is not the type of game I want to play.

There are also issues where game crashes and D/Cs affect group PVE content so it can affect other players outside of PVP combat. I participate in CZ or RES combat at CGs in wings and it can be rather problematic when your wingmates suddenly drop out or can't reconnect for various reasons.

Essentially the issue here is that I don't want to be "penalized" for encountering frequent crashes or D/Cs simply because a small but very vocal player group believes that their desire to grief other players is furthered by excessively punishing the entire playerbase for the limitations of an inherently unstable game.

 

[Sole Hunter]

Sadly yes. Although SDC are absolutely to blame for their own bad rep, there's no denying that. However some people need to learn to seperate their dislike of SDC's conduct and the ability to recognise the existence of a valid issue. It's really not all that hard to not react to everything as if it were a binary option of either black or white. I managed to do it with my first post in this thread where I simultaneously took the pee on SDC for being Lance Armstrong telling us about the ills of cheating and also acknowledged the point being made was a valid one regardless.

The real sad part in all of this is people endorsing cheating publicly on these forums and they don't even get sanctioned for it.

That alone speaks volume and shows that there's a serious issue in this community. You should never endorse cheating no matter how much you disagree with a group playstyle.

 

[Sole Hunter]

http://i.imgur.com/MQ1NPNZ.jpg

Okay I took a step back.

LOL that's the picture I made long time ago. Still the most deadly weapon to date against these terrible arguments.

What I learned from this thread so far :

1) Large portion of the community is endorsing cheating.
2) Frontier doesn't care about combat logging and doesn't do anything to stop it.
3) Frontier is still terrible with communication.

Nothing really seems to be changing for the best. I look forward to 2018, maybe I'll reinstall the game.

 

[Asp Explorer]

1) Large portion of the community is endorsing cheating.
2) Frontier doesn't care about combat logging and doesn't do anything to stop it.
3) Frontier is still terrible with communication.

Please, indulge me, but how do you work out and conclude 1 and 2?

3 - I am in complete agreement with.

 

[Sole Hunter]

Please, indulge me, but how do you work out and conclude 1 and 2?

3 - I am in complete agreement with.

There's people legitimizing combat logging against a player group because they disagree with their views in this thread.

Frontier got caught once before and apologized for not following standard report procedures and it was all over the gaming news and now this.

There's links of a dude in this thread still playing this game with dozen of reports and videos of him combat logging on purpose.

 

[Asp Explorer]

The fact that there's people legitimizing combat logging against a player group because they disagree with their views in this thread.

What if they are roleplaying a psychopath and that player group doesn't exist in their experience of reality?

The fact that Frontier got caught once before and apologized for not following standard report procedures and it was all over the gaming news and now this.

Are you in full possession of FD's internal reporting procedure? How do you know they have deviated?

The fact that there's links of a dude in this thread still playing this game with dozen of reports and videos of him combat logging on purpose.

There was a guy on XB1 years back who got about 400+ people angry and demanding his head on a spike. It was wondrous! He blazed his own trail and made his own content - and page after page of illiterate RAEGing pew-pews was quite a sight to behold. Hat's off to that player - they certainly filled their lulzbucket.

 

[Riverside]

The fact that there's people legitimizing combat logging against a player group because they disagree with their views in this thread.

The fact that Frontier got caught once before and apologized for not following standard report procedures and it was all over the gaming news and now this.

The fact that there's links of a dude in this thread still playing this game with dozen of reports and videos of him combat logging on purpose.

So how would you solve the problem?